


Heartbeats

by Likerealpeopledo



Category: The Mindy Project
Genre: Angst, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-22
Updated: 2014-09-22
Packaged: 2018-02-18 05:07:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2336381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Likerealpeopledo/pseuds/Likerealpeopledo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She’s sitting next to a question mark.  She doesn’t remember much after the phone rang, except she is wearing two different shoes and no bra and it was 3:28 a.m. when the cabbie honked that he had arrived.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> It's an idea I was working on before the Angst Fest was posted, but hey, it fits. It's inspired by bits of spoilers that I read over the summer, but not nearly close to what the actual spoilers were, so if you want to be unspoiled, you really still are. Ya dig?

“I ran out of clean spoons, so I’m eating my Chubby Hubby with a measuring spoon.”

She can tell that he’s about to ask why she didn’t just wash a spoon, but instead he says, “That’s resourceful.”

“One half teaspoon at a time. I would say this is a low point, most certainly.”  Danny’s been out of town for three days, and it feels like fifty. She doesn’t always realize how much she relies on his presence, just to make it through a Wednesday. Danny-less Wednesdays are tough.

“Cool, keep me in the loop.”  His attention is clearly drifting, but it’s also past his bedtime in his current time zone.

“How many scotches are you away from yelling at clouds for being too fluffy?” Mindy knows the only way he could possibly find measuring spoons resourceful is if he’s had a few from the hotel bar.

“That isn’t the problem that I have with---“

“Gotcha, you old curmudgeon!”

“Damnit.”

“Listen, when you get on that plane tomorrow, pray to all your saints and popes that you land safely because I have no idea where you take our dry cleaning and I cannot lose that Trina Turk dress you took in last week.”

“That’s why you don’t want my plane to crash?” He sounds angry, and a little hurt, and she winces.

“Besides the many, many reasons that I love and adore you, Daniel, I also love and adore my diamond print dress. And you love and adore not paying for something twice, so it’s win-win-win.”

“I take the dry cleaning to that place on 12th--"

“Ah, ah, ah. I like to leave a little mystery in our proceedings…”

“You just said that you loved that dress and if something does happen, I am GIVING YOU THE VITAL INFORMATION WITH WHICH TO RETRIEVE IT.”

“Danny, turn off your caps lock.”

“We’re on the phone. Talking. With our voices.” She can feel his blood pressure rising over the phone line.

“And you are talking with your OUTSIDE VOICE.”

“Sorry. I get worked up.”

“You do. Faster than anyone I know.”

“Never tell a man that he’s faster than anyone you know, unless he’s running a foot race.” He scolds, but his tone is light.

“Danny, don’t remind me. I miss the Staten Island Handshake something awful.”  They'd had a quickie as he was walking out the door on Sunday night, his pants bunched at his ankles, her underwear pushed aside, not even fully removed.  Her knees buckle at the thought. 

“I’ve been practicing the thing, y’know, with the—“

“Don’t give it away. I want to be surprised. And in case you’re wondering, the bedroom is one area I don’t mind the yelling.”

“I love you, Mindy.” Even his _I_ _love yous_ are gruff; he has two speeds, gruff and gruffer, but she loves them both. She’s grown accustomed to them, and to his face, and she can't wait to have him back home.

* * *

 

 

She’s sitting next to a question mark. She doesn’t remember much after the phone rang, except that now she is wearing two different shoes and no bra and it was 3:28 a.m. when the cabbie honked that he had arrived. The cab driver eyes her bedraggled appearance and doesn't really question, because this is New York and bitches be weird. Well, that's what he mumbles anyway and she's too distraught to react indignantly. She can barely feel her own hands, and her appendages seem disconnected and too heavy to carry on her own. She finally notices that she’s clenching her fingers together forcibly and the tightness brings her a strange and bewildering comfort.

Kansas City. What does Kansas City know about cardiac care? Do they have doctors there that weren’t trained on the internet? Kansas Fucking City.

Danny sure knows how to throw a conniption. Okay, it's more of a myocardial infarction, and what the hell? He’s only forty, plus he’s the healthiest person she knows. He eats nothing that is processed or sugary, barely anything the color white, except pasta, but he makes that fresh, so it’s yellow and egg yolky and…she doesn’t want to think that he might never make her pasta again.

He works out daily; he runs and lifts and she suspects he might punch a hunk of hanging meat in a freezing cold barn but she can’t prove it. He takes vitamins and has regular check-ups. It’s those damn cigarettes. They did this to him. To her.

When she gets back from Kansas God Forsaken City, she is absolutely setting fire to every cigarette in the Tri-State area. But not allowing anyone to smoke them. Okay, maybe not set fire to them, it would be at cross purposes. She’s definitely going to destroy them; maybe she’ll dump them in the bay, or bury them in a landfill, or rent a diesel truck and-- she’s bound and determined, because what if they destroyed her Danny?

Is Kansas City in Kansas? No, maybe it’s Missouri. Is that a real place? It sounds made up. Is it Mississippi? She’s angry that she didn’t pay more attention in geography class and that she’s ever had to pay attention at all. Why didn’t she pay more attention to the things that mattered? And why hasn’t the nurse called her back?

She checks her phone, noticing that her battery is low and she has no idea if she brought her charger. She grabbed items, she knows, as if she was on a game show throwing giant hams into her cart, racing down aisles and banging into shelves. She may have some of her dirty laundry from last week and she definitely doesn’t have her toothbrush. She checks through her bag and finds that she has Danny’s t-shirt and a pair of his jeans, and she momentarily considers hugging them fiercely. He’s fine, he’s fine, he’s fine. They diverted the plane and made an emergency landing because he’s _fine_.

* * *

“You’re a disaster.” His voice is thick, and husky, and the tiniest bit broken, like he hasn’t used it since they talked on the phone.

The TSA agents at the airport definitely gave her a second look, and she never bothered to glance into another mirror after she left the house, because she knew what she’d see was the truth.

She mutters something about dressing in the dark because she was rushing to the side of her ailing boyfriend in the middle of fucking nowhere.

Everything she wants to say feels very melodramatic and hyper-real; the hospital is no place for that. It reeks of disinfectant and suffering and the insistence of those within it that time not move too quickly nor too slowly.  She means to be nonchalant because what if post-heart attack Danny is a skittish mutt from the rescue shelter that senses fear and recoils or retreats? So she needs to ration her tears, and her fears, and the manner in which she approaches him.

She doesn’t know where to put her eyes or her hands, and she presses her fingers underneath her own armpits. She really wants to put them over her eyes and shield herself from what she sees, even though it isn’t half as frightening as how she feels. He is so small; his coloring is suddenly so grey, and his weirdly long feet are exposed at the bottom of the scratchy sheet and the too thin blanket. What? Missouri can’t afford some Egyptian cotton? She knows that his toes must be cold and he hates that. He’s so much more vulnerable because he’s sick and has been alone in Kansas Effing City, and he didn’t know if he’d ever see New York again, let alone a pair of those rag socks that he likes.

Priorities now are shifting. Priorities are this blinking LCD monitor, and his heart rate, and oxygen levels (which she notes to check) and she wishes she could remember anything that she ever learned in med school about cardiology because the medicine could ground her. Ground them both.

She can only say his name, in a small, plaintive voice, before he breaks. The noise fills the small room, and bounces off its walls, and it takes her more than a few seconds to realize that the noise is Danny, and his sobs, and they take over his entire body. He shakes, his shoulders and his chest, and she stands grounded to her spot at the foot of his bed. She’s never seen him cry, save those masculine tears that welled up when he tried to leave her on their first dating attempt; now that his body has tried to leave both of them, he’s crying full stop.

His tears turn her inside out, and she knows now that she is not equipped to handle this. She looks toward the door, and the hallway, and wonders how quickly she can run and how far she can get before the guilt stops her mid-stride. She stays because she knows it is not the guilt that would stop her. He is the love of her life. She’s said it before, to strangers, and she doesn’t say it enough to him. For as much as she adores romance and watching the rituals from afar, she’s realizing that she’s terrible at performing them, and it is Danny who is actually pretty wonderful. She hears him say something about being glad she's there, and he gradually begins to calm.  He clears away any remnants of his tears with a swipe of his arm, and he looks at her, expectantly.  She doesn't immediately speak, because she's still a little dumbfounded, and discombobulated, and she'd love to blame jet lag, but it's just plain old fear.

 _Nothing’s lost; nothing’s lost. He’s here and he’s talking and he’s the same. No, he’s not the same, but he’s here._ She makes concessions, because she’s already bargained with Danny’s God for him to be awake, and conscious, which he is, so she can’t have more than that. Not now.

Seeing him lying there slams the reality into her; reality wants to push her over, knock her down, make her call Uncle.  She wants to apologize to him for everything that she’s ever said, or the things she didn’t say. She wants to apologize for the times she pushed until he clenched his fist or slapped his open palm against a closed door, or for every time that she caused him to have to push down any anger or emotion that he couldn’t trust her to handle. She will apologize for everything that caused his arteries to bottleneck and corrode, that could've caused his heart to scar and finally partially die--she feels the weight of that responsibility, the brunt of it; the emotional fall out is hers.

It ripples through her and changes her center of gravity; so much so that she has to perch on the edge of the vinyl hospital issue chair, even though she wants to be closer to him and not further away.

She wants to make a joke, because that is her nervous energy go-to. Maybe one about knowing how his heart really was three sizes too small; it’s not her best work, it is a little cliché, but it’s apropos and she’s already fitting square pegs into round holes here. Her default setting is levity and awkward pop culture, and she feels something bubbling inside that she can’t identify.

She’s seen him in a hospital bed before, the pervy meningitis, and this is nothing like that. She’s talked to the doctor on the phone; she knows the damage, and that they don’t have to do surgery, not this time. He’s weak and he’s frail, and she feels like she’s seeing him again for the first time. She counts the hours that they’ve been separated since this happened, how many seconds he spent here alone, not knowing what was happening to him, not knowing when she’d come. She’s carrying the eight, adding and multiplying, when she realizes that he’s asleep now, and she’s barely said anything to him. Who shows up and stares at you and says nothing when all they want to say is everything? Who doesn’t even console you when you cry because she’s paralyzed by fear?

His chest rises and falls evenly, and it is some solace to know he’s still capable of that. She’s not capable of that, not now. Her breaths are fast and shallow, and she’d consider hyperventilating if it meant that he’d wake up and comfort her for just a few seconds. They’re so far from home, and their friends, and here she is, by herself, imagining scenarios in which she can coax a sick man into making her feel better. She’s a twisted individual. Now that his eyes are closed, and he is resting, she feels like she can finally see him. Take him all in, collect him.

She climbs into his bed as she realizes that the only thing that will possibly give her any sense of calm is to hold him. She can tangle herself in his circuitry and wires, which she finds ironic now, because everyone had always suspected:  Danny was a robot sent from the future, programmed to be suspicious of change and abhor music made post-1987, and now he'd proven them wrong--he actually had a heart. A rebel heart. A Benedict Arnold heart.

She tucks her head into the curve of his neck, and inhales all that is her boyfriend. It’s not enough to make her feel less adrift, and his scent is _off_ , like his molecules have shifted. She knows that it is a lie that your emotions have anything to do with the organ that pumps blood. She does not love this man with her heart, she loves him with some unnameable force that takes her over and moves her to act and think and do in ways that she did not previously act and think and do. What if he isn’t there anymore to love? And why is she worried it is her heart that will break? It has nothing to do with her heart, and everything to do with his.

“Don’t let me disappear.” She’s half asleep when she hears his soft voice in her ear, and she thinks that it is part of her dream, or something on the currently turned off television. She turns her face up to meet his, and realizes that it is Danny speaking, and he is also currently concerned that he may cease to exist sometime in the near future. His eyes are so sad. She might be most alarmed by the fact that he is not even pretending to be fine, that he does not have the energy to bullshit any false male bravado. This person, this man, she could never let him disappear.

“You're sticking around, mister.  If you even think about making a single plucky monologue to an intern about the importance of love and trust and then code out when they connect your message to their own dysfunctional relationship, I will murder you with my bare hands. Just rip you limb from limb.” She can’t stop herself from making a joke. It’s her only defense at this point. She can protect herself from thinking about how serious this is, how close she came to losing him, how close she could still be, if she can just diffuse it with humor. She’s beginning to realize how impossible this is to diffuse—she’s constantly cutting the wrong colored wire, and this time bomb is going to blow.  Soon.  Eventually.

“Did you tell Peter and Jeremy?” He always says Jeremy like it’s Germy, and it makes him seem like a little kid. Up until now, Danny’s been aging backward; his body and his face getting younger, when his personality has always been that of an elderly gentleman from one of the Outer Boroughs. Is his body trying to catch up? Is the old man that invaded Danny’s head space trying to take over the rest of him now?

She shakes her head. “No one knows I’m here…It was so early and my phone—I should call them. They think we’re playing hooky—or we’re dead. Probably murdered.”

“Not so far from the truth.” She wonders how long it will take for this to be something they look back on in fondness. Six, seven hundred years? She doesn’t even move toward the phone. She doesn’t have the strength to say “Danny’s in the hospital,” to another person. She had a hard enough time explaining it to the ticketing agent. She can’t imagine saying it to people she knows and cares about, who care about her and Danny.

“What do you want me to tell your mom?” Maybe they can be normal again; have banal conversation about the whos, and wheres, and whens, and leave the rest of the night behind them.

“Nothing. I don’t want her to know.” He says it less forcefully than it sounds. He’s still trying to protect everyone, and he mashes the palms of his hands into his eye sockets, rubbing fitfully.

“Seriously, Castellano, the next time you try to leave me you better have your bags packed and your 20 year old mistress waiting in the hallway.”

“I'm sorry.” He’s creeping back into maudlin, and that seems to be the area he’s most comfortable. She doesn’t know why he’s apologizing for something that he couldn’t have prevented, barely even predicted…unless he had been having symptoms for days, or weeks, and denying them. As she thinks about it, this scenario seems likely. He’s so stubborn, and so resistant to the idea that he cannot control everything that his mind and body do that it is entirely possible that he shoved back indications that something was about to go haywire.

His mouth is so close and she realizes that it has been days since she’s felt his lips on hers, stupid medical conference, and she doesn’t want to go another second without it. She presses her lips to his, and he seems almost surprised. She holds him tighter, attempting not to disrupt all that holds him together currently, feeling her own hot tears beginning to flow again, dropping onto his hospital gown and down his neck.

She rests her forehead against his, their noses touching, eyelashes mingling. She tells him that she's scared and she doesn't even realize it's coming out until it's hanging in the air between them.

“I still am.” He flicks his eyes away from hers, slowly drawing back. “I don’t remember things. I feel like my lens is faulty; I can’t see my memories clearly.”

She tells him that it’s the medication, his body has just undergone a trauma, and it will adjust. But she worries that the camera of his memory will stay obscured by whatever this event turns out to be, that he’ll never be back in focus.

“I am so fucking tired.” He yawns, and she can see how his brown eyes are hooded and foggy. “I tried…I tried to stay awake until you got here, and now that you’re here, I can’t stay awake. I…” She knows what he’s about to say, that he was afraid if he closed his eyes, that they wouldn’t open, and that the last time he saw her would be the last time he saw her. She knows, because it is how she felt in the cab, and on the plane, and how she would feel if she were the one in his place. She wants to say, _You could have died_ , because it is accurate, but decides against it, as it is too cruel and too _true_.

Before his exhaustion completely envelopes him, Mindy reaches for his hand, and Danny lifts it to his mouth to kiss their entwined fingers. It gives her a sweet relief that he is not so far gone that he can’t remember the things she likes, even if he feels like he doesn’t. “Just so you know, about the dry cleaning…”

She stops him, with another kiss, and still more tears. She figures it's going to be some time before she can kiss him without thinking of what she might not have, so he's going to have to get used to it.  She massages his scalp, and kisses his ear, and he curls into her as well as he can, like a cat napping on its owner. They both listen to her heart beat until he is comfortably back to sleep. She can do this, she can take care of him, she can care for him.

As Danny naps, she presses an _I love you_ into his hairline, where the grey bits line his temple. His skin tastes different now, like something metallic. She says it to the side of his jaw, where his stubble winds under his chin and down his neck. She places an _I love you_ into his shoulder, and onto his sternum, where his heart now beats strong. She whispers _I love you_ s into every part of his body that is exposed to her, because she doesn’t want to be the reason that his heart stops believing that it is true. 

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Danny's POV.

His memory of the hospital and flying back out of Kansas City is hazy, coated over by doctor prescribed Xanax and normal recovery exhaustion. He remembers waiting for Mindy, for what felt like forever, and the next thing he knew, he was back on the airplane. Danny has a nagging suspicion that the second flight crew was watching him extra closely. He knows it sounds preposterous; it isn’t the same plane he was on, he had boarded the first one in a completely different city (a city that right now, he doesn’t really recall at all, but he’s pretty sure it was out West) so clearly none of them had witnessed his episode on the first flight. He only remembers not wanting to make any sudden moves, and concentrating on holding Mindy's hand.

For the first few days that he’s home, he’s only ever half awake. He feels like an invalid (a person made weak by illness). He feels invalid (null and void). Mindy has to help him get dressed, and help him to the bathroom. She never really looks him in the eye, but she’s oddly patient, and he’s terribly impatient, as per usual.  He's crabby, but in a different key.  Everything Mindy's read has mentioned that he'd have the blues, but Danny feels like he may have the indigos, or the deep ceruleans.  She cradles his head in her lap as they watch television and try to pretend that things are regular, and she didn't just have to help him put on his t-shirt because he's too tired to raise his arms over his head, or help him out of the shower before that because standing up for too long makes him dizzy.

He wakes up at least once a night, clutching his chest. His cardiologist says that he’ll have the panic attacks for a while, maybe on and off indefinitely. He can’t decide which he hates more; the feeling that he’s reliving the moment that his heart seized up and stopped working temporarily or that he’ll have to relive it over and over and over, until it finally happens again. Mindy wakes up when he does, her face a twist of distress and concern, and does what she can to soothe his agitation. He feels guilty that he's bringing her down with him.

He can’t seem to ever get warm, which is one of the most ironic parts of this whole long, strange trip he’s on. The former human furnace is now the man with the constant chill, goose pimples cycling through his arms and legs, shivering even after a hot shower, or with a blanket on his lap. He feels like an old man, all of the time.

One night, she finally works up the nerve to ask him what it was like, when everything (they try not to name it, the Elephant Who Sat On His Chest) happened. Luckily for him, the human brain is a wondrous organ, helpful in hard times, and he remembers nothing that happened after he boarded the plane, on his first attempt to come home. He has bits and flashes of emergency personnel and electricity and an ambulance ride, but nothing that makes any more sense than anything else. He can’t tell her about a bright light or what the afterlife looks like, but he can tell her that a person’s mouth is very dry after receiving artificial defibrillation.

He may not have an important message from the beyond to impart, but he knows what he felt like when he woke up, alone, in the hospital room, and he knows that he never wants to feel that alone again. He doesn’t care if she tells everyone in the office every move his mouth makes from here until eternity, he’s not letting her get away. He vows, while she is out grocery shopping, and he is home, waiting, that he will propose to her as soon as he feels like himself again. He immediately worries that day is too far away, and he can’t waste any more time.  When she arrives home, her arms full of paper bags, he can't bring himself to ask her.  Not now, when he's still marked _Fragile_ , like an imported lamp.  Soon.

Because of the blood thinners, shaving is a murder scene, so he lets his beard grow. Mindy hates it, and tells him so; the beginning beard is too scratchy for her, the middle beard is too itchy for him. No one is happy.

Because of the increasing panic attacks, he barely sleeps. He always feels like he’s caught in the kind of dream where he’s free falling, and there is no ground in sight. In a strange way, it is exhilarating, and in another, infinitely exhausting. He craves proximity to Mindy, as if she is the only thing he trusts to tether him to this world. He can’t even pretend to try to sleep without her next to him, holding onto to some part of her. He spoons her, aggressively, to the point that she gets a little resentful that she can’t have her own space in the bed anymore. In compromise, he must have at least two body parts touching at least two of hers; his foot across her ankle, his hand on her ass. Sometimes he wakes up in the fetal position, hooked around his girlfriend like a prawn. He feels like he is collapsing in on himself, all sharp edges and points of light.

He is taken aback by his own inability to contain his emotions, which is something he used to specialize in.

He listens to A LOT of Bruce. Even _Glory Days_ makes him melancholy.

He overhears Mindy on the telephone, he isn’t sure to whom, saying that living with him is like living with a ghost. He slams out the front door, but doesn’t have enough energy to storm off properly, so he ends up on a bench two doors down from his apartment building. Mindy finds him there, her eyes wild with worry and something else he can’t name, and she says things that he’s never heard her say before. There is a chill in the fall night, and he didn’t bring his jacket, so his teeth chatter as she finally tells him, “You’re doing the disappearing all on your own.”

That night, he shows her how he’s not, by climbing on top of her and reminding her that the Staten Island Handshake is not for the faint of heart. It’s Mindy who has trouble breathing after that.

He tires quickly of the Danny Castellano Circuit Training 2.0 routine that he’s invented (bed to couch, to chair, to couch, to bed) so he lays on the rug, spread eagle, contemplating the ceiling and wondering how much longer until he feels normal again. Mindy comes home, carrying a bag of take out, and promptly drops it, screaming horror movie style, thinking that he’s dead on the floor. He sits up fast, too fast, and ends up nauseous and dizzy while his girlfriend convulses with sobs next to him. Her hair ends up in his mouth, and her tears are salty as he kisses them off of her, half out of comfort and half to ingest something that actually contains sodium. He promises her that he won’t include the rug in his circuit training any longer; it was a trial run that clearly ended poorly. The reviews were substandard and the ending overwrought. She laughs, and it fills him with something closer to joy. He misses making her laugh.

Mindy finally lets him tell her where he takes the dry cleaning, once she's fully convinced that he is not going to vanish the next time she closes her eyes.

He worries that he won’t remember how to birth babies anymore, after being ordered to recover at home for up to six weeks, so he reads his old medical school text books. He realizes that he’s never been the one doing any of the work. He practices his suturing on oranges and bananas, and Mindy yells at him one morning when she finds he’s doctored the banana she was planning on putting in her oatmeal. “Stop sewing the fruit closed!” She shouts, more amused than annoyed, because he can always play the Heart Attack (they can say it out loud now) card.

He finally has the energy to take progressively longer walks past their block, out of the neighborhood, and the first place he goes (after cardiac rehab) is the jeweler. Every day, he feels a little bit stronger, and a little less like his grandfather.  The other participants in the rehab program are at least 25 to 30 years his elder, but most of them are married, and their wives wait for them outside, reading magazines and holding their knitting.  He watches as the older couples walk home hand in hand, or arm in arm, the older men carrying their wives' bags as they wind down the avenue. 

She's in the shower when he gets home, and he gets in with her, fully clothed, holding the small blue box.   "I couldn't wait," he says, as he drops to his knee, and she horror movie screams. 

 


End file.
